Tonights’ attempt to get the PHP installation consistent was a disaster. When I got everything consistent with the remi distribution, anything that used object cache broke badly. I somewhat expected this since precompiled code in the object cache would no longer be valid but clearing the cache wasn’t sufficient, it kept getting corrupted.
I was unable to determine what was causing this behavior and so reverted the entire machine to a backup made on January 1st. I also had to revert the database for the system WordPress, Forums, and ownCloud, to January 1st, but users databases remain current. This is because when it corrupted object cache, it also corrupted the database for some of the WordPress installations in the system directory.
I am not going to futz with php on this box anymore, too dangerous. I’ve been wanting to move the web server off of CentOS 6 and onto Ubuntu 15.10 so I am just going to start building a new server and when I have it fully operational, will just replace the existing machine.